Skip to content
The DAM Book
Menu
  • Home
  • Bookshop
    • The DAM Book 3.0
    • The DAM Book Guides
      • Digitizing Your Photos with Your Camera and Lightroom
      • Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom 5
      • Multi-Catalog Workflow with Lightroom 5
    • Steve Uzzell
      • Open Roads Open Minds
    • eBook FAQ
    • Register
    • Affiliate Program
    • Media
  • Resources
    • The DAM Book 3.0 Resources
      • Content Revisions
      • Visually Speaking
      • Image Objects & File Formats
      • Using Metadata
      • Storage Hardware
    • Digitizing Your Photos Resources
    • Organizing Your Photos Resources
      • Organizing Your Photos Updates
    • For Educators and Students
    • Errata
  • About
    • In Person
    • Consulting
  • Blog
    • The DAM Book 3
    • Digitizing Your Photos
    • Announcements
    • Appearances
    • DAM
    • How to
    • Lightroom
  • Contact
  • Cart

Smart Web Images

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Peter Krogh

We’re starting to see some interesting new technologies for adding connected intelligence to images published on the web. It’s now possible to attach information and other links to images that can show metadata, display information from other websites, and provide clickable services like E-commerce. It’s also possible to make these Smart Web Images scalable and zoomable.  These images can even be aware of the device they are being presented on, and change form as they go from computer screen to a tablet to a phone.

In many cases, this is being done without the need for any kind of plug-in installation in your web browser, which makes the content vastly more accessible than plug-in-powered functionality.  I believe that this is typically done with HTML5-compliant tools, many of which were originally meant for streaming videos.  Because they are embedded objects – often as an iframe – they can hold their links even when displayed in a service like Facebook.

I first became aware of this approach with Piqsure, which allows for deep zoom of a large image, floating watermarks and connected metadata.

Piqsure_12_05_30,jpg

I also discovered another implementation recently through the IPTC Yahoo group. ImageSnippets allows you to create structured metadata for an file, including links to dbPedia and other databases. The service also has the ability to harvest the metadata it knows about a file and embed the information in the file’s headers, helping to prevent orphan works.

Home

Yesterday I saw Stipple, which looks like a pretty mature implementation of the technology. It allows you to tag regions of a photo with links and metadata. Judging from their web page, their main effort right now is to create a platform for E-commerce for images linked on Facebook. This could be a great idea if Facebook does not shut them down.

Stipple Logo

(Note to photographers, or anyone who wants to retain control of their images or identity. The Stipple ToS is pretty bad. It very clearly allows them to resell or reuse your images in any way they see fit, without your control or the option of termination, and you agree specifically to indemnify them and their licensees forever for any lawsuit regarding the images. I’d like to see that part changed, but they are clearly following Instagram’s lead.)

 

Posted in Metadata, Photo Business, Photographers' Rights

Categories

Recent Posts

  • More PS4 camera scanning rigs available April 26, 2022
  • Try Tandem Vault 3 (TV3) for 30 days for free! November 26, 2021
  • Some webinars/podcasts from the last year November 23, 2021
  • Negative Lab Pro – a slam dunk for negative conversion November 22, 2021
  • New batch of PS-4 rail systems ready November 21, 2021
Contact us
Copyright © 2022 The DAM Book – OnePress theme by FameThemes